Igor Borghi: Restless in Milan

Igor Borghi can’t sit still. On the other side of a table in Milan’s deeply cool Radetzky Café he flips his legs from side to side, leans forward, leans back, props his chin with his hand then practically leaps out of his seat and gesticulates in what is almost a caricature of a passionate Italian. If he weren’t so disarmingly charming, he’d probably be quite annoying. “I never sit down. People hate me!” he says. “The prop masters always get angry because I move all of their stuff. I want to shoot everything too, so DPs have to take the camera off me. They’re like, ‘fuck off Igor! What are you doing?’”

Falling in love

Borghi’s childlike enthusiasm for making films is infectious. “It’s not really a job, it’s a pleasure. I get frustrated when I’m not shooting, when I’m struggling to get a project moving. Once I’m shooting I’m never unhappy and afterwards I miss the crew. When a project’s finished it’s sad.”

Borghi isn’t just restless in his physical demeanor, he’s traveled the world and currently moves between a flat in Milan and his hometown Bologna, where his partner and two children live. “Bologna has a lively cultural past and is still a fun place. There are 150,000 students. When I grew up there we had 50 cinemas for 400,000 people.”

It was in one of those cinemas that he fell in love with film. “I used to go everyday with two friends and sometimes we’d watch three movies back-to-back. For three years we lived in that cinema.” They watched anything that was shown and it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) that first inspired Borghi to direct.

He began making films while studying politics at university but there were tough lessons to be learned. A short film about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England that he’d spent four months shooting at weekends on Super 8 and editing with sticky tape was lost in a fire at his friend’s house. “I was like, ‘arrgh!’. We had 30 minutes of edited film but it might have evolved into a feature.” He picked the camera up again six months later and, by the time he’d secured a rare place at the Italian National Film School in 2000, he was way ahead of his peers and learning nothing new, so left the course after three months. “I didn’t think I was better than anyone else. I was just more experienced. I’d made 10 films.”

Feeling his way forward

Not that he felt he knew it all. Borghi worked hard to get into the industry and ended up working as a first AD on feature films for much of the next decade, learning from mentors like Marco Tullio Giordana, with whom he spent four weeks in 2004 shooting Once You’re Born You Can No Longer Hide. It turned out to be a masterclass for Borghi. “He taught me so much in that month. I was like a little baby, asking him how he did everything.”

Just 18 months ago Borghi wrote and shot his first commercial as a director for a friend’s wedding planning business. Once it was posted online, production companies started calling with offers of other projects. It was hard for him at first as he won’t work on anything he can’t get excited about. “I always try to feel what I do, to go inside a project. It’s impossible for me to do something I don’t like, or feel, or see something in.”

He signed with a couple of firms but things didn’t really fall into place until he was snapped up exclusively by Mercurio, where he’s clearly happy. “They see the way I see,” he says.

Borghi says he’s not trying to achieve a particular style. “When you’re a 19-year-old director you want to move the camera so that people feel you in the movie, but the more you get involved in the process of creating images, the more you don’t want people to feel you, but just feel what you want to tell them.” However he is already accomplished in conveying a sense of a journey. His spot for cookery magazine La Cucina Italiana (which won second prize for European Branded Short in 2010’s CFP-E/shots Young Director Award) traverses a Milan that the locals didn’t recognise. “The budget was tiny so I did all the scouting alone. I wanted something that felt more international, not so Italian. People from here didn’t recognise a lot of the locations we shot.”

His recent spots for product simulation company AVL and Yamaha motorbikes also chart journeys. The former is shot from the POV of a young man as he experiences various milestones for the first time, and the latter concerns a lone motorcyclist’s expedition across Namibia. Borghi’s cinematic past shines through in his commercial work. “I try to really create a story in my mind. I really need to feel each project as a little movie. Even if it’s invisible (to everyone else) I can see it.”

Currently Borghi is looking forward to the premiere of the Bubble project he worked on with artist Marco Fantini. He shot a film that incorporates live action moving across three separate screens, which will be shown as part of the exhibition in both Milan and London.

A first feature

With years of experience of working on features behind him, Borghi is in the process of taking the helm of one himself. And it’s questions about this that make him, for the first time in an hour, sit still. All of a sudden he’s almost shy to talk. “It’s moving. It’s moving in a good way,” he whispers, nervous he might put too much pressure on himself. He won’t say what he thinks his best ad is either. “I’m too new to it, I’ve only done eight commercials. Hopefully we can have this chat after eight years and then I’ll tell you.”

Igor Borghi can hardly sit still, but with a future as bright as his, it’s unlikely he’ll ever have to.